Tag: Michel Leblanc

The Strange & Tragic Case of the Soviet Seed Man (Part 4)

Post author By reblast
Post date March 31, 2023
2 Comments on The Strange & Tragic Case of the Soviet Seed Man (Part 4)

This is the fourth and final of several posts wherein I explore the fascinating and tragic story of the world’s first seed bank and its heroic creator. My thanks to reader Michel Leblanc for sharing this story with me.

Posthumous Rehabilitation

Nowadays, Vavilov is revered as a hero in Russia—at least by most people. Despite its ups and downs, his bureau still exists, renamed as the N. I. Vavilov All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Plant Genetic Resources (VIR in Russian). Scientists across the globe have embraced Vavilov’s insight that genetic biodiversity is the key to a healthy food future. This has led to the founding of even bigger and more sophisticated agricultural stockpiles, such as the so-called doomsday seed vault in Svalbard, Norway. Fittingly, the VIR has donated seeds and other specimens to Svalbard—presumably many of them dating back to Vavilov’s early collecting trips.

First USSR stamp honoring N.I. Vavilov in 1977. Source — Wikipedia

Aftermath

The passion that sustained the scientists at the Bureau through the Seige of Leningrad continues today. Among Vavilov’s most productive and exciting seed-gathering expeditions took him in 1929 to Central Asia and the territory now occupied by present-day Kazakhstan. In biodiverse lands around Alma Ata and the foothills of the Tien Shan Mountains, he discovered the world’s richest concentration of fruit trees, including plum, peach and apricot; but in especially terrific profusion were the apple trees. In retrospect, this discovery confirmed his theory about the origins of culitvated species.

Wild abundance in the Tian Shan Mountains. Source — The Fatherland of Apples.

The Experimental Pavlovsk Station

Many of the seeds Vavilov collected during this 1929 expedition were eventually planted and grown out at the Experimental Pavlovsk Station, which lies just south of Leningrad, now Saint-Petersburg.

When the Nazis invaded the USSR, and the front lines of the war approaching very close to Pavlovsk, Vavilov’s colleagues, assistants and students moved as much of the Pavlovsk Station’s collection as possible to the basement of the Plant Industry Institute in the center of Leningrad. There they safeguarded the collections throughout the entire Siege.

Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has ordered an immediate inquiry into the Pavlovsk research station being turned into private housing. Photograph: Frans Lanting/Corbis. From an article by Fred Pearce in The Guardian UK.

Ironically, after surviving the Nazis, WWII, and the downfall of its creator, the Experimental Pavlovsk Station fell into disrepair with the fall of the Soviet empire. Then in the early 2000s, it almost fell prey to land developers. An impassioned international campaign on Twitter resulted in a stay of execution by then-Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. According to a scant entry in Wikipedia, in April 2012 the Russian government took formal action to preserve this important genetic repository and stop the land from being conveyed to private interests for development.

The passion to protect this precious legacy comes from its uniqueness. More than 90% of the plants are found in no other research collection or seed bank. Its seeds and berries are thought to posess traits that could be crucial to maintaining productive fruit harvests in many parts of the world as climate change and a rising tide of disease, pests and drought weaken the varieties farmers now grow. At stake, say campaigners for the station, are more than 5,000 varieties of seeds and berries from dozens of countries, including more than 100 varieties each of gooseberries and raspberries. Google searches for news related to the Pavlovsk Station turned up no new results, so let’s hope it is still intact.

On the former Melchior Philibert farm in Charly, the Melchior Farm in France experiments with food seeds collected by Vavilov.

Legacy

Seed banks around the world continue to benefit from Vavilov’s collections. In France, the Lyon branch of the Vavilov seed conservatory has been funded by the EU to grow out a thousand fruit, a hundred varieties of vegetables, cereals, and aromatic herbs, some of which are almost five centuries old. More than 300 varieties from Lyon, that are seldom cultivated today, were discovered in the Vavilov seedbank of Saint-Petersburg and will thus come back to life.

As modern commodified agriculture continues to come under threat from climate change, the seeds Vavilov collected, and his staff safeguarded, may hold the key to our future food security.

The resource list below provides more information.

References

Biodiversity Conservation

The Strange & Tragic Case of the Soviet Seed Man (Part 3)

Post author By reblast
Post date March 30, 2023
1 Comment on The Strange & Tragic Case of the Soviet Seed Man (Part 3)

This is the third of several posts wherein I explore the fascinating and tragic story of the world’s first seed bank and its heroic creator. My thanks to reader Michel Leblanc for sharing this story with me.

Nearly 3 million people were trapped in Leningrad during the siege. Only 800,000 survived. From TASS/Getty Images.

The Siege of Leningrad

Meanwhile, things were grim back at the Bureau. In June 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Leningrad was a major target of the Germans—in part because of Vavilov’s bureau. Nazi scientists appreciated the power of genetics – to a fault. (They essentially committed the opposite error of Lysenko in arguing that nurturing and environment counted for nothing and genes alone determine our fate.) The Nazis knew that Vavilov had gathered a priceless trove of agricultural riches and they wanted it!

Imagine the morale at the Bureau. Their boss had already been disappeared, and their own government had demonized them and called them traitors for their research. With Nazis marching on Leningrad, eager to steal their life’s work, who wouldn’t despair?

Then things got worse. The Siege of Leningrad dragged on for nearly 900 days. Instead of shells and guns, the Nazi’s main weapon was the very thing Vavilov had worked his whole life to prevent—famine. They tried to starve the Russians into submission.

Illustration by J. S. Lawson of wild pears collected in central Asia, one of six panels Vavilov gave to pomologist Richard Wellington at the International Genetics Congress in 1932. From Biodiversity Heritage Library.

As supplies dwindled, Leningrad’s residents started hunting dogs and cats. Soon they were reduced to eating lipstick, leather hats, and fur coats.

The only food in the whole city lay inside the Bureau. Incredibly, though, the scientists there never dipped into their stores to ease their hunger pangs. They were starving while surrounded by food—they worked with food, thought about food, touched food every day. Yet none of them ever put a morsel to their lips. As one later said, “It was hard to walk. It was unbearably hard to get up in the morning, [even] to move your hands and feet . . . but it was not in the least difficult to refrain from eating up the collection.” This wasn’t just stirring rhetoric, either. One emaciated scientist actually died at his desk, holding a packet of nutritious peanuts in his hand.

While Americans are familiar with one or two varieties of peanut, farmers in other parts of the world have been able to develop hundreds of varieties thanks to the peanut’s natural ability to shuffle its two distinct subgenomes to produce new traits. These are some of the peanuts grown by the Caiabí people who live on the Ilha Grande, Mato Grosso, Brazil. Peanut is very important for them and they cultivate diverse types, each one with its use, name and story. (Photos by Fábio de Oliveira Freitas). From an article on UGA Today, University of Georgia.

How could they fight off such temptation? First, they were thinking about the world after the war. They knew they would be able to help nations to get back on their feet and feed their people, especially in places where crops had been wiped out. They were also looking at the broader sweep of human history. Ever since the first farmers planted seeds some 10,000 years ago, there’s been an unbroken chain of crop plantings through time. The bureau scientists saw themselves as stewards of this heritage—arguably the most important heritage of humankind. Eating the seeds would have been tantamount to snapping that chain.

So the scientists waited, and they gradually died. A rice scientist, a potato scientist, the peanut scientist clutching that packet, and six more. In all, 700,000 people starved in Leningrad during the 872-day siege. But it’s hard to find any deaths more poignant than those nine food scientists.

The story continues in our next post. Meantime, please find below a list of references for more reading.

References

Tags Biodiversity Heritage Library, International Genetics Congress, J. S. Lawson, Michel Leblanc, Nazi Germany, Nikolai Vavilov, The Siege of Leningrad

Biodiversity Conservation

The Strange & Tragic Case of the Soviet Seed Man (Part 1)

Post author By reblast
Post date March 27, 2023
1 Comment on The Strange & Tragic Case of the Soviet Seed Man (Part 1)

Over the next few posts, I will explore the fascinating and tragic story of the world’s first seed bank and its heroic creator. My thanks to reader Michel Leblanc for sharing this story with me.

Saving the planet’s plant diversity. Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov and his labor of love. From a post by Thor Hatten on Medium.

The name Nikolai Vavilov is virtually unknown in the west today, which is a shame because he started the world’s first seed bank and developed theories about genetic diversity that is still valid today.

Born to a merchant family in Moscow in 1887, Vavilov grew up at a time when famine regularly visited the Russian countryside. A famine in 1891-92 caused an estimated 300,000 deaths and is credited with having given new life to the Russian Marxist movement. The young Vavilov heard stories of privation from his father and determined to dedicate his life to eradicating hunger. He entered the Petrovskaya Agricultural Academy (now the Russian State Agrarian University – Moscow Timiryazev Agricultural Academy) in 1906 and became known for carrying a pet lizard in his pocket wherever he went.

There are no known photos of Vavilov’s pet lizard. This image is courtesy of Pravin Gangurde on Unsplash.

Early Years and Influences

Before the outbreak of WWI, he was travelling through Europe and collaborating with British biologist William Bateson, himself a pioneer in genetics, on studies of plant immunity. Following the establishment of the USSR, Vavilov taught agronomy at University of Saratov before being named director of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences at Leningrad, where he served from 1924 until 1935. His extensive international collaborations included work with Canadian phytopathologist Margaret Newton, who was an expert on wheat stem rust. The early years of the Soviet Republic were characterized by food insecurity. Collectivization and drought combined to cause widespread famine. In 1921-1923, about 16 million people may have been affected by famine and up to 5 million died. These circumstances must have reinforced Vavilov’s commitment to eliminating hunger through better agriculture.

Image from Centre for Food Safety “6 Tips for Saving Seeds”

Guiding Principles

Vavilov’s reasoning was elegant in its simplicity and still holds today. He figured that modern agricultural crops lacked resilience due to inbreeding and lack of genetic diversity. So, much like agronomists today, he set out to find the wild antecedents of important food crops, mainly cereals, so he could reintroduce genetic diversity and breed more robust food plants.

Even in the 1920s, Vavilov’s search for wild food plants was a race against time and loss of biodiversity due to human development. He eventually made 115 seed collecting trips to 64 countries on five different continents. The many seeds, grains, fruits, nuts, and tubers he collected all found a home at the Academy in Leningrad, making it one of the world’s first seed banks. By 1931 the Bureau’s seed bank contained more than 10 million varieties of seeds.

As one historian wrote of Vavilov’s collection, “some [seeds were] dull-coated while others glistened like jewels. . . . The tubers, roots, and bulbs came in all sorts of textures, from knobby and gnarled to as smooth and burnished as a clay pot.” Fruits collected “exuded nearly every fragrance imaginable to a perfume chemist—musky, fermented, citric, and floral.”

Vavilov didn’t just collect seeds. He also understood the importance of growing them out. Seeds, tubers and so on were sent out to fields, orchards and paddies around the vast Soviet empire where they were grown by a small army of technicians. The resulting crops were harvested and then sent back to the Institute to replenish its seed supplies. By the end of the 1930s, he had more than 20,000 scientists and technicians working for him on this massive effort.

The story continues in our next post. Meantime, please find below a list of references for more reading.

References

Tags 1930s, Collectivization, drought, Famine, Genetic Diversity, Genetics, Lizard, Margaret Newton, Michel Leblanc, Moscow, Nikolai Vavilov, Petrovskaya Agricultural Academy, Seed Bank, University of Saratov, USSR, Wild Food Plants, William Bateson